1. Field of the invention
The present invention relates to communications networks having a number of interconnected components or nodes, and, in particular, to a system and method for improving internodal communications within a network of interconnected nodes.
2. Background and Objects of the Present Invention
With the exponential growth of the computer and the computer industry over the last few decades, information technology (IT) systems employing an ever-increasing number of interconnected computers and other components have become commonplace. A typical IT system or intranet may contain dozens of computers, servers and peripheral (printers, facsimile machines, etc.) equipment interconnected in a lattice or network. In the telecommunications industry, switching processors and other components are also becoming increasingly interconnected.
Within any such interconnected network of computers, processors, switches, etc., intercommunications between the various components, also referred to herein as nodes, are also growing rapidly with the increasing thirst for information sharing resources. Between the various nodes in a telecommunications system and extensions upon existing systems, for example, real-time communications are necessary to coordinate phone calls therethrough.
Existing protocols for implementing internodal data communications, although generally providing sufficient speed, efficiency and error handling for large networks and lengthy data communications, are not well-suited for small information package exchange. It has been found that for internodal communications of roughly 50 bytes or less between a small number, e.g., under 40, of nodes, existing protocols are not efficient. In fact, the xe2x80x9coverheadxe2x80x9d for such small scale communications under existing protocols in addressing, routing and error checking is often much larger than the original information content.
It is therefore, a first object of the present invention to provide an improved system protocol so that small information packages may be transported internodally with only a small amount of overhead.
It is also an object of the present invention to employ an improved addressing protocol to simplify internodal information package exchange and reduce the amount of data transference thereby.
It is another object of the present invention to provide alternative routes or links for the various internodal connections ranked according to the transmission costs associated with each alternative.
It is a further object of the present invention that if a communication link between two nodes in a real-time system fails, the improved system and method will discover the link failure and recover quickly by rerouting communications along an alternate route.
It is a still further object of the present invention to provide an improved system and method for internodal communications such that if nodes therein are deleted or added, the system and method will discover the alteration and modify operations accordingly.
The present invention is directed to a system and method for facilitating the routing of small information packages between nodes in a network. In particular, the system and method of the present invention utilize a routing table at each node of the network. The routing table for each node contains a list of the nodes, ordered the same in each table, and an indexing value is utilized to refer to particular node values. Internodal linkage information is also stored in the routing table along with alternative links should the primary link fail. The addition/deletion of nodes and the failure of any link is handled by an update function.
A more complete appreciation of the present invention and the scope thereof can be obtained from the accompanying drawings which are briefly summarized below, the following detailed description of the presently-preferred embodiments of the invention, and the appended claims.